not native visitors

August 30, 2007

This question came up recently in the writing workshop I participate in, and here is what Francine Prose answers in her recent book Reading Like A Writer:

"Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

"What confuses me is not the sensibleness of the question but the fact that it’s being asked of a writer who has taught writing, on and off, for almost twenty years.What would it say about me, my students, and the hours we’d spent in the classroom if I said that any attempt to teach the writing of fiction was a complete waste of time?Probably, I should just go ahead and admit that I’ve been committing criminal fraud.

"Instead I answer by recalling my own most valuable experience, not as a teacher but as a student in one of the few fiction workshops I took.

(She praises the editing help of the teacher, and the help she got by being ‘listened’ to, by the class, while she was reading her own work in those 'few' workshops she herself took.)

"That’s the experience I describe, the answer I give people who ask about teaching creative writing: A workshop can be useful.A good teacher can show you how to edit your work.The right class can form the basis of a community that will help and sustain you.But that class, as helpful as it was, was not where I learned to write.

"Like most, maybe all, writers, I learned to write by writing and, by example, from books.Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors.They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.And who could have asked for better teachers: generous, uncritical, blessed with wisdom and genius, as endlessly forgiving as only the dead can be?

"The truth is this sort of education more often involves a kind of osmosis.In the ongoing process of becoming a writer, I read and re-read the authors I most loved.I read for pleasure, first, but also more analytically, conscious of style, of diction, of how sentences were formed and information was being conveyed, how the writer was structuring a plot, creating characters, employing detail and dialogue.

"This book is intended partly as a response to that unavoidable question about how writers learn to do something that cannot be taught.What writers know is that, ultimately, we learn to write by practice, hard work, by repeated trial and error, success and failure, and from the books we admire.And so the book that follows represents an effort to recall my own education as a novelist and to help the passionate reader and would-be writer understand how a writer reads."

August 27, 2007

I went with my eighty-three year old friend, Elizabeth, to see 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix' the other day, after having just re-read the book preparatory to beginning the new one. (I've since finished re-reading 'The Half-Blood Prince' - is it Sirius? - and will begin the new book this weekend.) We both enjoyed the film production. My friend has been a therapist for many years, and I have the theological and pastoral counseling background, as well as my own healing work, so we approached the film from those angles.

Up until this most recent re-reading and viewing, I was starting to feel that the books were getting 'too dark' - but now I realize I was wrong about that. These books are just the most phenomenal creation! Nearly every fairy-tale motif and folk-fantasy is represented within their pages, and the psycho-spiritual wisdom is simply astounding. Not to mention the author's grasp on the psychology of the young, as represented by Harry in particular. In fact, what she was doing in these later books escaped me until I re-read them. So glad I did!

August 20, 2007

“As it was, the hut felt just right: flimsy, isolated, almost furtive, a place to pray truly, a theft of time from a greedy world.A place where prayer still felt like what it really was, something dangerous.“Is not my Word like a fire?saith the Lord; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?”He had drifted; you always drifted.Mike found his breath and rode it into the flame again, and memory sweltered and cracked in that soft fire, into shards of regret and bewilderment, benediction and dread: the mystery, the burning knot, the impossibility of self and world.The slipshod walls of scrap and junk sighed and settled like a hearth; the fear within him burned and burned, and he sat at the heart of the fire it fed and breathed cool air. "

August 09, 2007

I'm participating in two novel-writing groups. They are very different and balance each other quite well. I have learned a lot through this process, and one of the main things I've learned is that thinking 'The Manticore' is one of the best books in print ruins me as a successful modern writer. I say this at least partially tongue-in-cheek. Seriously, folks, I did read a lot Jungian authors in my thirties, meaning books by Jungian therapists about their theories and discoveries and case studies. Robertson Davies' book is simply a fictionalized version of those. And I do sometimes wonder if I'm ruined as a novelist because of it.

October 18, 2006

My mother lived in a social world populated bylittle old birdy ladies in fidgety hats, with china teacups-and-saucers precariously balanced over art nouveau brooches, silk scarves,and delicately scented floral handkerchiefs with lace edgings.They were the remnants of the World War I ‘girlfriends’, the ‘widowed fiancees’, the semi-sacred female relics of the Great War - the abandoned and bereaved, the well-preserved.When I was a little girl in the 1950’s, and Mother would take me with her to the Wayne Avenue Tea-room for lunch, with its stained glass windows, huge urns of rubber plants and mother-in-law-tongues, I had to be on my best behavior.Nevertheless, I loved to go there, and I often wondered why there were so many of these ladies, eagerly chatting over tiny corners of toast and melted cheddar cheese, Waldorf salad, raspberry sherbet, and the omnipresent orange pekoe tea in tiny pots.Although ‘with snow on the roof’, their eyes shone bright with an inner fire never quenched by the prosaic realities of everyday life.They were courageous, they were survivors.

What was the well-spring of their intense energy?Where was the source of their tenacious grip on life?Was it because they were faithful to spiritual beings?They were loyal and true, even ever-so many years later.Or was it because they were a female society unto themselves.They were Herland, although they were not all ‘lesbians’ (woman-identified women)by choice, exactly.Circumstances of life had forced them into a female society where they flourished exultantly, courageously, spiritedly, in perpetual virginity and old-maid-ism.

They lived together in apartment buildings, boarding-houses (of the better quality), hotels and ‘pensions’, if they were lucky, or lived at home with relatives if not.They worked in offices, shops and libraries by day, spent their evenings dining together, then attending lectures, musical recitals, poetry readings, church-services or seances, according to their predilections.They read, embroidered, wrote letters, sketched, and conversed, visited the sick and organized philanthropic ventures.Undoubtedly they denied and subsumed many of their less pleasant passions into these activities.These ladies often had what might be called an acerbic edge, which made them witty and interesting.They channeled the considerable dynamism of their feminine goddess energy in socially acceptable and altruistic ways, though the ways of society had to expand with the vigor of all those unmarried females on its hands.

August 28, 2006

"I begin each morning by practising yoga. And after that - fasting on a lemon - I set about writing, which is only another form of yoga. Writing is an excellent ritual for training the concentration, memory and observation. It is an exercise of the capacity to dream and associate, and not least a training in truthfulness. For I agree with Saul Bellow, that one knows immediately if a sentence has come from the right layer of one's consciousness. If it has, it straight away begins to breed and flourish on the paper, in that it gives birth to and attracts to it a whole mass of other sentences. If it is a lie, or you write from a shallow place in your consciousness, then sooner or later you go stale and can write no further. Sometimes this morning ritual is a catharsis of tears and laughter. In any case it is an extra dream dimension to everyday life, which allows a person the rare privilege of bathing twice in the same river. Still I wouldn't attribute to 'writing' any greater importance than to baking bread, knitting a shawl, planting asparagus, or playing the piano."

I'd like to let this paragraph just stand here by itself, because it certainly warrants a singular attention, but I just have to mention what happened on Sunday evening, after I took that solitary contemplative walk through the neighborhood and then returned home. When I turned back onto my street, I saw the emergency vehicle coming around the corner. I'm sorry to say it was coming for my neighbor, G., who is only 54 years old. Apparently he'd had a heart attack and they could not revive him. I watched his wife cover her face with her hands, I watched them fruitlessly pounding on his chest when adrenaline and electric shock were not enough. It was such an ordinary night. A gentle, quiet Sunday evening.

It reminds me of the words of a Spanish-language poet, whose name I don't recall, who was read in translation at "Freight and Salvage," a local folk-music spot in Berkeley, on Saturday night. I may be paraphrasing, but here is how I remember the lines: "And those are the good men, the ones who love, and work, and who, on an ordinary day, lay themselves down under the ground."

August 26, 2006

At the Berkeley Public Library Central collection, while searching for an Alan Furst novel for my husband, by chance I came across a book of short stories titled "From Baltic Shores" . Now, as you may know, I've been exploring my baltic heritage, and this felt like a very serendipitous find. I'm trying to find out something about my cultural roots from the british isles and the baltic region. I can sprinkle my speech with Jewish idioms and Italian phrases, thanks to my upbringing, but I know nothing about what it means to be danish! So, here are some excerpts from my explorations:

"In the summer, I have several guests in my garden. Sometimes I have the feeling it's like Epicurus' garden, where one 'laughs and philosophizes.' 'Bene vixit bene latuit' - he who lives in obscurity lives well - said the same Epicurus.

"My garden is surrounded by a hawthorn hedge and high trees and runs down a slope covered in violets to where the fields of barley, rye or wheat begin. Cows also graze there, and I think it gives a quite special sense of luxury when you go for a walk and twenty cows come running delightedly toward you. I well understand the psalmist Kingo, who lived in the Løve district and wrote an ode to a cow. That cannot be done too often.

"Apart from lilacs, wisteria, laburnam, jasmine, apple and plum trees, I have a big copper beech in my garden, to the right of the two rockeries. There are usually two nests here. Uppermost is a hawk's and below it a little wood-pigeon's nest. You could say: Uppermost is the Pentagon or the Kremlim, a nest of stones, gravel and concrete, and below it, the dove of peace in its thin little nest of straw, grass and leaves. No sooner has she hatched eggs than the hawk swoops out of the air and snatches them all. All the same she stays there, year after year building her nest under that of the bird of prey. So if the garden reminds you of life and death, you also come to think of futility. A bird of prey and a dove in the same tree; it can never turn out well. But it keeps on going."

This is from Suzanne Brøgger of Denmark, whose short story "I Live as I Write and I Write as I Live" is the first in the collection. I enjoy the understated sense of humor, the country-wisdom, the appreciation of simplicity and of nature, the sense of relatedness to the Greeks, the love of obscurity and 'humility.' She makes a point to let us know her garden is only 100 km from Copenhagen. I feel exactly the same way she does about the dove of peace and the bird of prey.

July 30, 2006

i used to write what i called 'fragments.' i came across this one recently while cleaning through old shelves of notebooks. i think i wrote it about twenty-five years ago.

Susann clambered up the pile of old cans and crates to the top of the old stone wall that separated the alley from the railroad tracks.She swung her legs over the edge and dangled her heels against the jutting gray stones, sparkling silver with mica and sandwiched together between layers of ivory concrete.She looked over the rows upon rows of black-creosote-painted tracks, their smell pungent in her nostrils as she chewed an apple meditatively.Of course, the apple was too mealy, but the sun was shining and her bare legs were comfortably cold in the late autumn air.Her sweater, too small for her, worn and shrunk by many washings, was short in the sleeves and too billowy in front where she had stretched it out of shape by pulling on it and rolling her arms in it.Now it was more or less wrapped around her long flat-chested bodice and tucked under to hold.

Susann liked it down here by the railroad tracks.It was peaceful and deserted and different.Trains moved through the maze of tracks very slowly, and not very frequently anymore.Bits of broken glass shone like jewels among the stubble here, and the old tin cans rusted by the side of the tracks, the twisted chunks of wire and metal strewn about, reminded her of the people she saw around the city, sitting in doorways, slumped over on the subway, everyday.People who had been refused, and were now refuse.Poor people.And not just the really poor, poor people, but also a lot of the nicer people too.Little Mr. Benton, who sat still and quiet for hours at his newspaper stand, and if you spoke to him, would grin into your eyes until his whole yellow face was a mass of long wrinkles, and who would talk loudly and with great gusto except none of the kids could understand him.He spoke something called ‘geechie,’ which, Susann thought, might possibly mean he was crazy.

And then there was quiet Mrs. Jones, who always seemed to be pulling a loaded shopping cart, usually with clothes in it, a big turtle-shaped old black woman, whose knees and feet seemed painfully distended, yet who always smiled, and when she spoke in her soft deep rich voice, and called you ‘honey-chile’ or ‘angel-lamb’, it made you feel so good inside.All these old, funny-shaped, funny-talking, used-clothing-wearing people.

A cold invigorating breeze occasionally blew down as if funneled into Susann, reminding her of the tartness of a winesap apple, the kind of apple she wished she were eating right now instead of this old mealy one, and making her dream of the North, a land of snow and ice, of short days and green skies at sunset.

July 26, 2006

Been doing some reading lately that requires integration of new ideas. Three books, which I'll mention in no particular order, and will mention highlights only. So, here's the first of the three:

I'm discovering a new vision of the historical Jesus through Bruce Chilton's "Mary Magdalene." I have a friend who has had for many years a mighty fascination with Mary Magdalene, not as prostitute or consort, but as 'friend of the Lord,' and teaching companion. Well, what we know about the early disciples of Christ is next to nothing by today's standards of knowledge, and everything that has been written in the past is pure speculation. This book is also speculation, but it is educated speculation, and what I would call 'historical reconstruction' - something like those reality shows on PBS, where people try out life on a ranch or an early American colony. These reconstructions are based in historical documents we do have: lading slips, diaries, and supplemented by what people experience today when they try on 'period-life' like a costume. The new historical research into the life of Christ and early christianity is a complex reconstruction of storytelling-styles and traditions, coupled with snippets found in letters, alternative gospels, written homilies, and other traces of information that have been painstakingly collected and analyzed over the past hundred and fifty years or so of 'historical criticism.' Well, it turns out my friend was probably right about MM being a teaching companion of Jesus, something I certainly never encountered in my early religious education as a Roman Catholic, ie the Petrine tradition, which from the start was opposed to the Magdalene tradition.

October 31, 2005

Purple shadows at evening, a certain hardness underfoot, the rattle of dry cornstalks along the roadside on her walk home from school, these were all sure signs of earth turning its corner into winter.Tracy Martin, almost thirteen, knew this already from her own experience.

Old Aunt Mae Beulah, who helped Momma with the canning and other tasks around the farm, always said that when the sky turned purple at night and the ground white with hoarfrost in the morning, then the dark grandmother Time will soon swallow the year, and the old jawbone of the moon will eat up any children who roam out after dark....